Eyelid Surgery

My name is Richard Bensimon, I'm a board certified plastic surgeon in Portland, Oregon. I'd like to speak to you about eyelid surgery.

The importance of eyelid surgery is that it evokes one's person, one's personality, and the aim of the surgery is to clean up aging changes but not create an unnatural look. The conventional approach to lower eyelid surgery is to incise the skin and go through the substance of the eyelid to get at the back where some fat is that needs to be addressed.

This approach almost always leads to a rounding of the outer corner of the eye that gives a little bit of a circular appearance that's permanent and not attractive. An alternative approach, which I advocate, is to address that fat from behind the eyelid and in the majority of patients you can do this operation completely without an external incision. And although that's important, the look is very different because we're not altering the internal anatomy of the eyelid and the outer corner that's not round out, a critical point.

This interestingly is a short procedure. The recovery usually is quite simple. Patient can really go out as soon as they feel comfortable, and particularly for the upper eyelids, it's day or days. Lower eyelid perhaps a little longer, but with glasses, even clear glasses, it's very easy to hide. The power of this operation is quite remarkable. You can sense it the minute you walk into the room after surgery, once they're fully healed, the brightness and the spirit of the patient is palpable after the surgery. They know it, they look at themselves, and they project it.